Strategic actions towards AI governance: Stakeholder engagement

This sub-guideline is part of the guideline Strategic actions towards AI governance. Refer to the main guideline for context and an overview.

This sub-guideline provides guidance and recommendations on engaging with stakeholders from across parliament as part of the AI governance and adoption process. 

Establishing good AI governance in parliament involves many stakeholders from across the institution. These will come from a range of levels and from across many different functional areas or organizational units. 

Building strong engagement is crucial for creating buy-in within parliament as well for identifying risks, challenges and opportunities. Identifying which stakeholders need to be engaged with and then building that engagement with them early in the process of AI adoption is vital, helping to build support, knowledge and understanding across parliament.

Since the organizational structure and size of parliaments varies greatly, certain roles may not exist in specific parliaments (especially in smaller or less well-resourced legislatures). However, as a general rule, parliament should consider engaging on the following matters with the bodies, units or teams listed below:

• Approve AI policy, strategy and budget: Senior leadership
• Develop and support AI policy: Legal staff
• Identify legal risks and implications: Legal staff
• Identify areas for AI value addition: Business staff
• Implement data literacy and AI literacy programmes: Training staff
• Ensure practical grounding of strategic actions: IT and data staff
• Manage AI implementation risks: Risk management team
• Ensure compliance with regulations: Compliance team
• Address ethical considerations: Ethics and data committee
• Plan financially for AI projects: Finance department
• Manage communications about AI initiatives: Communications team
• Oversee AI project implementation: Project management office governance.

The Guidelines for AI in parliaments are published by the IPU in collaboration with the Parliamentary Data Science Hub in the IPU’s Centre for Innovation in Parliament. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence. It may be freely shared and reused with acknowledgement of the IPU. For more information about the IPU’s work on artificial intelligence, please visit www.ipu.org/AI or contact [email protected].